My Only Friend in the Universe
by Magichild
Summary: Shortly after the events of 'The End', Rimmer tries to comfort himself with the only friend he's ever had in life.


Rimmer was finally alone.

Not that he wasn't, in a way, always alone. And if he thought about it even more, he always had been. It was as if he had been operating on a different plane of being since the moment he was born - nothing he did ever went the way it should, nothing he did ever let him connect to people. And now his very existence was an extreme metaphor of that fact. So alone he couldn't even reach out to touch the world around him.

He had spent yet another evening with Lister. Another evening of painfully bad guitar playing, another evening of lager spilling all over the floor and unheeded 'No Smoking' signs (not that it mattered much now, being dead). Another night of bemoaning the loss of all hope of ever having _the _Kristine Kochanski.

He was sick of it. Not just Lister, but everything Lister reminded him of. Every mess he made was a reminder that he couldn't touch things to clean it up, every anecdote and mention of Kochanski highlighted just what he had never got to have.

He had always dreamed about that girl he was going to meet. Of course his brain wouldn't really let him be happy, conjuring up images of some awful woman the size of a house, with a screeching voice who wore underwear the size of duvet covers...but sometimes she was almost real, and he could feel the anticipation tinged with pain waiting to find her. She was out there, he had been sure of it. When he was an officer she'd be there, lickity split. Arnold J. Rimmer, Second Technician wouldn't get a girl like that, but once he passed his AstroNavs...

And on the darker nights, the nights when he knew he would never, ever amount to anything, he liked to torture himself with the idea that maybe she wouldn't care about AstroNavs or officer pips or what kind of speed he was going up that ziggarod.

All he'd ever really wanted his whole life was a friend. Oh love, he wanted it of course, he wanted power too, and success, and the big house on Mars. But what he _needed_, was someone to tell him that he was wanted.

Rimmer couldn't open his locker - it was shut with a thick padlock to keep Lister out, but now he couldn't touch it kept him out too. Somewhere inside was the closest thing he had ever had to a friend. They'd been through hell together - when he was growing up he'd had to sew him up and restuff him hundreds of times after his bothers stole him. They'd called him a girl, and he'd tried not to cry, scared that they'd do something he couldn't fix. At boarding school he'd lost one of his ears, and someone has stolen his helmet, but he'd known to always sleep holding him, carry him around in his bags.

His teddybear, Napoleon, had been squashed, ripped, soaked, flushed and beaten almost as many times as Rimmer had been himself. And that was why when it came to it, he hadn't been able to leave him behind. He'd tried. He'd scoffed at himself. Officer Material didn't bring teddybears on important space missions. More importantly, what if someone found him? He'd never live it down. But...he couldn't walk away from him. He'd put him in a box, ready for storage back on Io, but he could feel his scratched, loosened, mismatched eyes on him through the cardboard. Not accusing. Scared of being forgotten and left alone in the dark.

Eventually he'd stuffed him at the bottom of his backpack, hoping no one on board would ever find him. And luckily, no one ever had. Not even Lister, who read his diary and went through his things as if he _were_ dead and gone.

He knelt by the grey locker, and glanced back at the doors to their shared quarters. Lister had gone down to get drunk on another deck, but he was in the habit of always checking he was alone before getting Napoleon out.

He reached out, trying not to flinch as he saw his hand disappear through the metal surface. He had tried to put his head through before, but he couldn't see inside, since he wasn't _really_ putting his head through the door. His light bee was still outside, and that was how he saw things, not with his eyes. It was both hard and so easy to forget that. But he knew in his head, where it matters, that if his hand were real it would be in the locker, his hand resting on the spot he knew he had left his sitting in, 3 million years ago. Napoleon had been on his own in the dark for so very long.

He realized sadly that even after all this time they were still sharing the same journey. They were both locked off from the outside world now, an impenetrable barrier between them and touch. They were both alone. Finally life had separated Rimmer from the only friend he had ever had.


End file.
